Chinese Tycoon Gives Columbia $26 Million

By KAREN W. ARENSON

Published: October 1, 1997

Universities are ranging farther and farther afield in raising money, increasingly looking abroad to tap foreign alumni they have long ignored.

But Columbia University is getting a $26 million gift from a less likely source: a Chinese businessman who never graduated from Columbia but whose brother-in-law is on the engineering school faculty. The businessman, Z. Y. Fu, is giving the engineering school $26 million.

Columbia will put the money in endowment and use the income to recruit faculty in computer science, biomedical engineering, applied mathematics and electrical engineering. In a statement, Mr. Fu said that he wanted to honor Columbia's long association with Chinese scholars and insure that Columbia ''will continue to grow in strength as an international leader in science and technology.''

Born in Shanghai to a family of 13 children and educated in China and Japan, Mr. Fu founded the Sansiao Trading Corporation in Tokyo in 1951, and conducts business in international trade, securities and other investments.

Mr. Fu's brother-in-law, Prof. Chia-Kun Chu, said Mr. Fu first started giving to Columbia eight years ago, when at age 70, he endowed a chair at the engineering school because he ''wanted to do a good thing.''

His relationship with the university deepened when he came to New York the following year and took courses in Columbia's General Studies program to brush up on his English, said Professor Chu, the chairman of the applied physics department. ''He had lots of fun,'' Professor Chu said of Mr. Fu. ''He liked it enormously.''

A few years after that, Mr. Fu gave Columbia nearly $5 million for 24 fellowships for students of Chinese origin who are not American citizens.

As they look to raise money abroad, universities like Columbia have had marked success in Asia. In late 1995, for example, Gordon Y. S. Wu, a Princeton graduate from Hong Kong who built China's first superhighway, gave the university $100 million. (Like Mr. Fu, Mr. Wu directed his money to the university's engineering school.)

The Columbia president, George E. Rupp, has actively courted foreign givers since he arrived in 1993. ''I thought it was important that Columbia make more of its very high international profile, particularly in Asia,'' he said. ''To send a signal, I decided to make a trip to Asia.''

Columbia, which has an endowment of $2.6 billion, raised $202 million last year, about $6 million from foreign givers.

Mr. Rupp said that philanthropic attitudes outside the United States are changing slowly. ''The cultural philosophy we take for granted here doesn't exist anywhere else,'' he said. ''First, we have to work on discussing whether there is any reason at all for them to make philanthropic contributions. In many countries, there aren't tax preferences for donations.''

The engineering school, which Columbia will rename the Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science, has about 1,100 undergraduate and 900 graduate students. Zvi Galil, dean of the school, said that with the help of the new money the school plans to add 15 to 20 faculty members in the next 5 to 10 years.

''It is a no-strings-attached gift that will come all at once,'' Mr. Galil said, ''and it is targeted at people, at problems, and at faculty and students, not buildings.